Forty years of failure: how to challenge the narrative of Hard Brexit

Labour needs to tell people a clear and convincing story about what has happened to Britain since the 1970s if it is to have any hope of challenging the Hard Brexit fairy-tale.

The Houses of Parliament reflected in a puddle following Prime Minister Theresa May's speech at Lancaster House, where she outlined plans for Brexit. Yui Mok/PA Wire/PA Images. All rights reserved. We face a general election for which it
is widely accepted that the only real issue is Brexit. Every TV news broadcast
seems to feature interviews with former Labour voters stating that they will
break the habits of a lifetime to vote for Theresa May, because they believe
she will ‘deliver Brexit’. Despite last year’s referendum result having come as
a huge shock to pollsters, Remainers and the entire political establishment,
coherent explanations as to why and how this situation arose seem few and far
between.

The right-wing press has been pushing a consistently Europhobic narrative since the signing of the Maastricht treaty.

Of course the factors leading to the
Brexit vote are multifarious and complicated. Yes it is true that
data-processing wizards Cambridge Analytica generated carefully cultivated data
on voters in order to target them through social media. Yes it is true that
millionaire right-wing fanatic Arron Banks spent an awful lot of money (see the
New
Statesman on both of these stories). More importantly, it is also true
that the right-wing press has been pushing a consistently, and often
fantastically, Europhobic narrative since the moment that the Maastricht treaty
was signed, and that this has been consistent with the xenophobic politics
which it has promoted, almost without respite, since the 1970s at least. (The
best available guide to all these and other factors, in my opinion, is here).

It is also true, statistically speaking,
that the majority of Brexit voters were affluent old Tories. No doubt many of
them are honest, decent people who genuinely believe the tale told to them by
the Telegraph and the Mail: according to this story, despite decades
of globalisation and less than 2% of global manufacturing now taking place in
the UK, there is still this thing called ‘national sovereignty’ to which the EU
constitutes some kind of threat. A cynical Marxist might point out that they
are probably willing to believe this tale to the extent that it does not
generate in them any ‘cognitive dissonance’: that uncomfortable, jarring
feeling that a story does not quite fit either with the facts or with one’s own
objective interest. The reason it does not produce any such dissonance might be
that if you are someone who owns property in the South of England, and the rest
of your life’s income is going to depend more on the value of your pension fund
than on your wages, then the Tory right’s plan to use Brexit as a mechanism to
further depress wages for British workers, and to further cut taxation and
public spending, does not trouble you at all.

But, as the above description might lead
one to expect, if these were the only people who had voted for Brexit, the Brexit
vote-share would not have reached 40%. What tipped the balance in favour of
Brexit, and what now threatens to annihilate Labour at the forthcoming
election, is the firm belief on the part of a swathe of working-class voters
that somehow Brexit will restore the world that they have lost – the world of
full employment, a strong British manufacturing base and a stable sense of
community and national identity. It is no accident that it is overwhelmingly
voters old enough to remember the passing of that world who voted in large
numbers to bring it back; young working-class people simply hardly voted at
all.

What tipped the balance in favour of
Brexit is the firm belief on the part of a swathe of working class voters that
somehow Brexit will restore the world that they have lost.

It is easy for highly-educated Remainers
to scoff or despair at this state of affairs. Of course, to anyone who knows
enough about British and international politics, the idea that leaving the EU
will do anything at all to restore those lost socio-economic conditions is
absurd. If anything, under current political conditions, it will only
exacerbate the problems, allowing finance capital to dominate British society
on a scale which will make the 80s and 90s seem tame by comparison. This is why
one of the strongest indicators of how any citizen outside the Tory shires was
likely to vote in the referendum was whether they had been to university, or even
had A-levels: almost everyone who had voted Remain.

This is not because the people who voted
Leave were stupid. Quite the reverse is true. They voted logically and
rationally on the basis of the best information available to them, and on the
basis of who could offer an explanation for their conditions, which seemed both
coherent and cognate with the facts of their own experience. There is no
question that the overriding factor here was the campaign of deliberate
disinformation to which the British public has been subject by the popular
press for decades, specifically on issues connected with immigration and the
EU[1].
But the other key factor is one which has hardly been discussed at all: the
failure of either Remain or Labour to offer a coherent alternative narrative
which could explain, and convincingly offer to alleviate, their circumstances.

Forty years of failure

Successive governments have served the interests of finance capital rather than serving the interests of the people.

That alternative narrative is not
difficult to frame, although nobody in the political mainstream has made any
serious attempt to do it in popular terms. It would involve pointing out,
simply and clearly, that since the moment when Prime Minister James Callaghan
and Chancellor of the Exchequer Dennis Healey agreed to the IMF’s terms for a
loan to the UK government in 1975 – involving massive cuts to public spending
and taxation – successive UK governments have served the interests of finance
capital rather than serving the interests of the people. That is why the
factories have gone, the wages have declined, and the public services don’t
work any more. In the service of those financial interests, governments have
pursued a failed economic model: one based on the expansion of personal,
household and national debts and the transfer of economic activity from
manufacturing to retail and services. The communities who suffered most from
this transfer have never been offered any adequate compensation for it; nor
could this economic model ever work in such a way as to offer them any.

Such a story would involve promising
those communities that, inside the EU or outside of it, government would
finally seek to draw a line under this history. An end to ‘forty years of failure’ would be the slogan. Do you think that this narrative is somehow too
abstract and too difficult to grasp for the great British public? Then ask yourself if the City of London and
the IMF would really make less plausible culprits for the woes of working class
Britons than that obscure technocratic institution, the European Union. And if
you think that 40 years is too long a time-frame for such a popular narrative
to inhabit, then ask yourself why it is the European Union which has become the
plausible object of people’s misplaced anger.

Who to blame?

Without the unions to blame, the press has focused its hateful energy on immigrants, refugees, asylum-seekers...

Is it a coincidence that we joined the
European Economic Community (the predecessor to the EU) in the early 1970s,
ratifying that membership by referendum in 1975, and that it is the EU which
has become the hate object of this discourse? Of course it isn’t. Membership of
the EU has coincided precisely with the period of Britain’s
de-industrialisation and the hegemony of neoliberalism, during which much of
the post-war welfare state has been cut, privatised or ‘reformed’ out of
existence, while the trade unions who once guaranteed a stable life for working
people have been beaten into the ground.

Let me spell it out a bit more clearly.
Since the 1970s the right-wing press has been pushing a narrative according to
which what was wrong with Britain was either greedy and unruly trade-unionists,
or too many foreigners, or probably both. Once the trade unionists had been
thoroughly defeated, from the late 1980s onwards, the first part of this story
was no longer plausible. But of course, people in many parts of the country
continued to experience social dislocation, job insecurity, poverty and a sense
that those in power did not serve their interests. Without the unions to blame,
the press has focused its hateful energy on immigrants, refugees,
asylum-seekers and that mysterious abode of unaccountable bureaucrats, the
European Union. All of which adds up to a perfectly plausible explanation for
what has gone wrong with Britain if you are someone without much education, or
much opportunity to see the world, living in a small town or a former
industrial region in England or Wales.

What exactly the relationship is between
our membership of the EEC/EU and that process of de-industrialisation is a
question for another time. My point here has nothing to do with the question of
whether EU membership has made neoliberal de-industrialisation more or less
likely. My point is simply that if we think about the fact that EU membership
has coincided precisely with the history which also begins with Callaghan’s
capitulation to the IMF, then we can see why it has been easy to persuade
people that leaving the EU might somehow bring an end to the period which began
then. And we can see that the only way to dissuade them from that view, or to
persuade them that the Tory Right does not have the re-industrialisation of the
North and the Midlands as any part of its current plans, would be to offer an
alternative narrative about what has happened to the country since the 1970s.

The trouble with ‘austerity’

Of course Labour has been trying in
recent years to tell a different story. But here is the key problem. That story
has focused almost exclusively on the politics and social effects of
‘austerity’. But what does ‘austerity’ mean?
Basically it means attacks on government spending and wages. Of course
it is true that since the 1970s, such attacks have been a periodic feature of
aggressive neoliberalism. But they have not been a consistent feature of
government policy or of neoliberal strategy throughout that time.

New Labour implemented a form of
neoliberalism which allowed wages to rise, modestly, especially for the poorest
workers, and which increased public spending massively in key areas. At the
same time it extended and deepened the Thatcherite privatisation of the public
sector; forced schools and hospitals into market-based models of
administration; massively extended personal and household debt; facilitated the
further de-industrialisation of the economy; pushed for the EU to relax its own
rules protecting workers’ rights and allowed UK income-inequality to worsen. But
it didn’t practice austerity. So ‘austerity’ in contemporary British political
discourse can’t refer to the period of neoliberal de-industrialisation in
general, which has been carrying on since the mid 1970s. Instead, in effect,
the term is generally understood to apply to the policies pursued by the
coalition and Tory governments since 2010.

If you are someone whose community has been suffering not just for 7 years, but for 40, then talk of ‘austerity’ means little.

And here is the problem. If you are
someone living on benefits, or employed by the public sector, working in one of
the economic sectors not affected by de-industrialisation, or too young to
remember what industrial Britain was like, then the period since 2010 has
indeed been much more uncomfortable than the one which preceded it. It’s no
surprise that those are exactly the people – the remaining 27% of the
electorate – who continue to back Corbyn’s Labour. They are the people for whom
an ‘anti-austerity’ politics makes sense. But if you are someone whose
community has been suffering not just for 7 years, but for 40, then talk of
‘austerity’ means little. You want to hear a story which takes account of the
fact that things have been going wrong for you for decades. The ‘austerity’
narrative cannot accommodate that. The Brexit narrative can.

There has always been a narrative
available to the left, and the Labour leadership, which could have done the
same work – and could have won over the same people – as the Brexit tale. That
is the narrative which would, as I have already suggested, point out that the
period during which things have been going wrong for people in those
communities has been precisely the period during which UK governments have done
the bidding of the City, the IMF and Washington more willingly than that of the
British people.

Maybe this narrative would actually use
the word ‘neoliberalism’, maybe it wouldn’t (to everyone who tells me that this
is far too complicated a term for the public ever to understand, I am always
minded to point out that there are peasant farmers all over Latin America who
can tell you exactly what ‘neoliberalismo’
means, and where it comes from). That isn’t the point. The point is that it’s a
story which is easy enough to tell, and which would resonate strongly with many
people’s immediate experience. The question is why we haven’t heard it.

Trashing the record

Here is the answer: for all that the
Labour right accuses the left of ‘trashing the record’ of New Labour in
government, it is actually difficult to find a single example of Corbyn or
McDonnell publicly offering anything like the narrative that I have laid out
here, since Corbyn became leader of the party.
McDonnell obviously understands it at least as well as I do, but he
routinely presents anything like this narrative only for highly-educated
audiences, and even then tends to present neoliberalism as a project that has
reached the point of exhaustion, rather than a turn that should never
have been taken.

The reasons for this are not hard to
fathom. Despite the obsessively bad press that they have received, a lot of the
Labour leadership’s energy over the past two years has gone into trying to
persuade the party to hold together at all, especially in parliament. From this
perspective, it is easy enough to see why they have avoided propagating a
narrative which would effectively blame Blair just as much as Thatcher for the
woes of post-industrial Britain. To do so would be intensely divisive, given
that most of the current Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) are Blairites to the
core, and do not accept that there was any structural problem with the New
Labour project at all.

This is actually more true of the
current PLP than it was of the PLP during Blair’s time, because the current
cohort of Labour Members of Parliament is the outcome of Peter Mandelson’s
long-term project to control candidate selections across the country, which
only came to final fruition with the 2010 intake of Labour MPs, almost all of
whom came into parliament assuming that they would be representatives of a
party led by David Miliband. As such, it would be very difficult indeed to
mobilise them in support of a narrative which claimed that the entire direction
of the British polity since 1975 has been the wrong one.

Who has come along with an alternative narrative about what has gone wrong since the 70s? The Brexit lobby. Is it any wonder that those former Labour voters now look likely to hand Theresa May a landslide?

Unfortunately, it has also proven
predictably difficult to persuade them to lend support even to Corbyn’s weakly
social democratic programme, which rather negates the argument against Corbyn
putting forward a potentially divisive narrative which might actually have some
purchase with the wider electorate. Indeed, it would probably have been
impossible to persuade the PLP to back Corbyn even if David Miliband and Tony
Blair themselves had penned the entire manifesto, such has been their personal
petulance and entitled sense of outrage ever since the moment of Corbyn’s election.
So the argument that the ‘40 years of failure’ narrative which I have advocated
would have been too divisive simply doesn’t hold much water. Trying to keep the
PLP onside has been a waste of time and a wasted opportunity.

This should have been the theme of
Corbyn’s first speech, and it should have been the core message of every
speech, every policy announcement, every media statement, every argument: the
country has been going in the wrong direction for 40 years; we are going to
change that. If the Blairites didn’t like it then they should have been forced
to defend their record in public. Ideally the narrative could have been
presented in a way which didn’t blame anyone: ‘mistakes were made’, ‘intentions
were good’, ‘things look different in hindsight’. All of that could have been
put across in a way which did not dilute the core message: things have been
going wrong since the 70s, we are going to put them right.

Instead the party’s narrative and policy
agenda have focused obsessively on the ‘austerity’ theme which was only ever
going to mobilise a quarter of the electorate. And who has come along with an
alternative narrative about what has gone wrong since the 70s? The Brexit
lobby. Is it any wonder that those former Labour voters, unmoved by the
‘austerity’ story, who flirted with UKIP for a couple of years, now look likely
to hand Theresa May a landslide?

Is it too late now for Labour to begin
to offer a coherent story? It is probably too late to have any hope of averting
electoral disaster (unless the party is willing to accept the need for a coalition strategy). But
it is never too late to start down the right track. Even now a more effective narrative
could help to limit the damage. But any such narrative must be able to match
the Brexit story in historical scope and implied political ambition. The ‘austerity’
story simply doesn’t do that. Promising an end to the forty years of failure
just might.

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